Editorial: L. Brooks Patterson's comments are the last thing the region needs

Jan. 20, 2014

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson seen during the Detroit Economic Club's Big Four luncheon held in the Cobo Center ballroom during the 2014 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. / Kimberly P. Mitchell/Detroit Free Press

Written by

the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

Once upon a time, whenever he received a particularly abusive letter, L. Brooks Patterson would dispatch a reply slyly suggesting that the intemperate author had been a victim of identity theft:

Because I have always held you in the highest esteem, Patterson’s stock response invariably began, I want to alert you that some (expletive) has been dashing off rambling, incoherent letters and signing YOUR name ...

A lot of people who’ve known and respected the longtime Oakland County executive throughout his 21-year tenure must have felt an impulse to fire off similar letters Monday after the New Yorker magazine published a profile in which Patterson seemed to be channeling some deranged, suburban version of former Detroit mayoral candidate Tom Barrow.

“What we’re going to do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and throw in the blankets and corn,” Patterson told the magazine’s Paige Williams for a lengthy profile headlined: “Drop Dead, Detroit!”

Elsewhere in the lengthy piece, the Oakland County CEO opines that stopping for gas anywhere in Detroit is “a call for a carjacking,” attributes a gruesome case of child neglect to Pontiac’s “trailer trash mentality” and concedes that “anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive ... The truth hurts, you know?”

In a statement Monday, Patterson’s spokesman said Oakland County’s executive had been cast in a false light.

Colorful and quotable, Patterson has been notorious throughout his career for straddling, and occasionally violating, the line between acerbic wit and tastelessness. But he has always taken justifiable pride in his fiscally responsible and occasionally visionary management of Michigan’s wealthiest county, and in recent years he has been cautious about saying things that sabotage his region’s economic recovery efforts, especially in front of a national audience.

His remarks to Williams are a glaring exception. Appearing at a critical moment in Detroit’s struggle to recapture its solvency and re-brand itself as a city of innovation and possibility, they represent a betrayal, not only of Detroit, but of the pragmatic Oakland County manager who has worked to promote its recovery.

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This is, after all, the same Patterson who fumed when his own party’s governor vetoed the creation of a regional transit authority, the county’s executive who championed the renovation of Cobo Hall and supported a regional tax to buoy the Detroit Institute of Arts. Patterson has never been the most progressive Republican in America, but he has come a long way from his days of resisting the desegregation of Detroit’s schools. To watch him regressing to the cartoonish demagoguery of his earliest years is as depressing as it is dismaying.

Patterson often expresses confidence that posterity will judge him for his deeds, not his words. But that prophecy will be jeopardized if his public utterances continue to undermine his real accomplishments.

We hope the Oakland County manager will use his remaining tenure to promote the impression that the man portrayed in the New Yorker profile is a distorted caricature — someone who cruelly borrowed Patterson’s identity to lampoon and sabotage the county he loves.